Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Ciro once read that there are two types of mathematicians/scientists (he thinks it was comparing Einstein to some Jack of all trades polymath who didn't do any new discoveries):

TODO long after Ciro forgot where he had read this from originally, someone later pointed him to: www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf Birds and Frogs by Freeman Dyson (2009), which is analogous but about Birds and Frogs. So did Ciro's memory play a trick on him, or is there also a variant; of this metaphor with a gopher?

Ciro is without a doubt the bird type. Perhaps the ultimate scientist is the one who can combine both aspects in the right amount?

Ciro gets bored of things very quickly.

Once he understands the general principles, if the thing is not the next big thing, Ciro considers himself satisfied without all the nitty gritty detail, and moves on to the next attempt.

In the field of mathematics for example, Ciro is generally content with understanding cool theorem statements. More generally, one of Ciro's desires is for example to understand the significance of each physics Nobel Prize.

This is also very clear for example after Ciro achieved Linux Kernel Module Cheat: he now had the perfect setup to learn all the Linux kernel shady details but at the same time after all those years he finally felt that "he could do it, so that was enough", and soon moved to other projects.

If Ciro had become a scientist, he would write the best review papers ever, just like in the current reality he writes amazing programming tutorials on Stack Overflow.

Ciro has in his mind an overly large list of subjects that "he feels he should know the basics of", and whenever he finds something in one of those topics that he does not know enough about, he uncontrollably learns it, even if it is not the most urgent thing to be done. Or at least he puts a mention on his "list of sources" about the subject. Maybe everyone is like that. But Ciro feels that he feels this urge particularly strongly. Correspondingly, if a subject is not in that list, Ciro ignores it without thinking twice.

Ciro believes that high flying birds are the type of people better suited for venture capital investment management: you know a bit of what is hot on several fields to enough depth to decide where to place your bets and how to guide them. But you don't have the patience to actually go deeply into any one of them and deal with each individual shit that comes up.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) episode 1 mentions as quoted by the Wikipedia page for Eratosthenes:That's Ciro.

Some related ideas:

See also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Full channel title: "Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People".

1-2 to hour long interviews, the number of Nobel Prize winners is off-the-charts. The videos have transcripts on the description!

TODO what is their affiliation/who is behind it? There is nothing on the website.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Stories small wiki with almost no citations.

A polygon is a 2-dimensional polytope, polyhedra is a 3-dimensional polytope.

Related ideas:

Much of this section will be dumped at Section "Website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system" instead.

Most notable example: $L^2$.

This is the future of course, fusion power to generate electricity, and then converting electricity into food somehow.

Hopefully without going through photosynthesis, which feels complicated and wasteful.

Others:

Off-the-shelf techniques to become a teaching superhero.

Customized website idea at: OurBigBook.com.

That which does not exist, cannot be broken.

And of course:

The website moved from AsciiDoctor to OurBigBook Markup in 2020, making this section mostly useless. But hey, history!

Ciro's website is powered by GitHub Pages and Jekyll Asciidoc.

The source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io

Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:

Source: ./run.

The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.

Tested on the latest Ubuntu.

Publish changes to GitHub Pages:

Source: ./publish.

GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output... so the actual source is in the branch dev.

Update the gems with:

His website was originally written in markdown, however those were deprecated in favour of AsciiDoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: markdown-style-guideuse-asciidoc

GitHub pages is chosen instead of a single page GitHub README.adoc for the following reasons:

Ciro's ideal city to live in contains the following in order of decreasing importance:

Could California be Ciro's Mecca?

These are people which Ciro never met personally, and who might not know that Ciro exists, or might never had any direct 1-2-1 online contact with Ciro, but Ciro is convinced are his brothers in some other dimension due to how many opinions or behaviours he feels they share:

Some other idealists that are a bit further out but with some similarities:

Ciro Santilli also things of those people as being part of his 108 Stars of Destiny troupe.

Ciro sometimes ponders why is it so hard to find people online that you truly love and admire. Maybe it is for similar reasons why it is also hard in the real world: the great variety of human interest, and the great limitation of our attention spans. But online, where we have access to "everyone", shouldn't it should be easier? Not naturally finding such people is perhaps one of the greatest failings of our education system.